Fashion, fun and frolics in Second Life

KITTY RANT: If I can have an ARC of 1 at Hair Fair, why can’t you?

Deep breath time….Ooh I am *cross*.

I’ve just managed to get into the Purple sim at Hair Fair. It’s lagalicious; it’s like walking through mud with potentially the worst lag I’ve ever seen and shopping is practically impossible. Even when you manage to buy demos you can’t rez them to try them on, and then when you do they’re *buggered*. So you buy demos and zoom home to try them, then you can’t get back into the sim. Shopping hell.

Now, as you read my previous post alluded to wearing very little out of consideration to fellow avatars to ensure that we all have a happy hair experience, but it appears my words of encouragement fell on a few deaf ears, because I’ve just seen an absolute bunch of twonks in Hair Fair wearing so much bling that it’s a wonder they haven’t brought the grid down, let alone the sim. Normally I wouldn’t be so bothered, because I do believe that Avatar Rendering Costs aren’t necessarily a good thing, because I think they may well lead to discrimination etc. BUT at an event that is only running for a short period of time, and one that is for charity at that, I think it may be important to consider the weight your avatar is adding.

I am walking around barefoot and bald, in a bikini, with an ARC of 1. This will probably be the only occasion in Second Life history where this happens, but hey-I’m doing my bit. Which is more than I can say for the pillocks with ARC’s of 1500 and above..FFS, you’re buying HAIR! You don’t need your bling boots, whips, prim trenchcoats or your jetpacks…just put some pigging underwear on for modesty’s sake and go like that!

Perhaps at this kind of event ARC limits may have to be considered. We all know how popular Hair Fair is, so I seriously doubt that sales would suffer…

Check your ARC people before you go to Hair Fair, please.

To do this, you need to go into:Advanced->Rendering->Info Displays->Avatar Rendering Cost.

….and if you don’t do it, please be warned that I may have to kill you when the lag subsides.

3 thoughts on “KITTY RANT: If I can have an ARC of 1 at Hair Fair, why can’t you?”

The next time I’ll drop to the Hair Fair I’ll go as a cloudie ;) it should have an ARC of zero…

Seriously, the lag is actually not THAT bad. I took pictures from my old iMac with a low-end graphics card (one that I even believe to have faulty memory!) in Ultra settings with 512 m drawing distance. I was surprised when I saw that I still had 7 FPS!… that was really amazing, although I shouldn’t be so surprised: the building team setting up the Hair Fair are pros who know how to create good and low-lag buildings. Naturally, textures take a lot to load — that’s unavoidable, when each prim has a different texture :) But there are tricks to deal with that, too.

Naturally, if you have 20-30 avatars in a sim, all pulling 10,000+ textures (one per face!) from a single server — there is simply not enough bandwidth for everybody to enjoy quick rezzing. And yes, this means stressing up a server quite badly, and enjoying the bad effects of a time dilation of, say, 0.4 or even lower.

Now this has little to do with the avatars you see ;) Unless you zoom in to a group of people full of ARC 4000+ hair, you won’t notice the difference. Come on!… ARC is just a measure of client-side lag, not server-side. And client-side it means just tweaking with the Preferences. Just set the drawing distance to very short, turn avatar impostors on, and put the settings on the “avatar” slider as low as possible. High-ARC avatars will be simply rendered as a single texture and that’s as low as you can get — way far lower than rendering a full avatar mesh with 7,500 polygons and an ARC setting of 1.

ARC settings are a problem to interpret correctly. Believe me, in a sim full with high-resolution textures (it’s a *fair*!… we *have* to see those nice pictures, we can’t avoid that!), everybody could go around in their underwear and you still would experience slow rezzing — which comes from the way the servers need to push all those thousands of textures at you. An avatar usually just has a handful of textures — head, torso, and legs, plus 2-3 for hair, and 1 per attachment. Granted, the avatar meshes have a high number of polygons, but you cannot avoid that — even wearing invisiprims, the mesh is still there — although you certainly can turn everyone in sight into avatar impostors and get rid of those pesky avatars :)

I consider myself educated, reprimanded and hushed Gwyneth! Seriously though, thanks for the educational input-I’m just an impetuous mare who throws a hissy fit when things don’t work perfectly the first time. However, I *have* been back to Hair Fair tonight and it was a lot better..my guess is that’s because the initial frenzy has worn off, or it could be because I’m not running around it in a mad and happy fashion!
=^..^=

Kitty Nibbles

192,162 NOMS!

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I blog about the wonderful things I find on my personal journey in Second Life. You’ll find everything fabulous about the metaverse here; including virtual fashion, events, and much more. Enjoy your visit and please feel free to comment! (Oh, and to get a better looksy just click on the pictures to make them larger..it's magic!)

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